EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Does Terrorism Work?

Eric Gould and Esteban Klor

No 12, Economics of Security Working Paper Series from DIW Berlin, German Institute for Economic Research

Abstract: This paper examines whether terrorism is an effective tool to achieve political goals. By exploiting variation in terror attacks over time and across locations in Israel from 1984 to 2006, we show that local terror attacks cause Israelis to be: (i) more willing to grant territorial concessions to the Palestinians; (ii) more willing to accept a Palestinian state; (iii) less likely to identify oneself as being right-wing; and (iv) more likely to have a favorable opinion of Arabs. These effects are especially pronounced for individuals from particular demographic groups which are typically right-wing in their political views. In addition, we show that terror induces Israelis to vote increasingly for right-wing parties. This pattern of results demonstrates that right-wing parties are becoming more accommodating to Palestinian demands for territorial concessions. Hence, this paper shows that terrorism appears to be an effective strategy in terms of shifting the entire Israeli political landscape to the left. These findings may shed light on the causes underlying the spread of global terrorism in the last few decades.

Pages: 41, 17 p.
Date: 2009
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.diw.de/documents/publikationen/73/diw_ ... /diw_econsec0012.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Does Terrorism Work? (2010) Downloads
Working Paper: Does Terrorism Work? (2009) Downloads
Working Paper: Does Terrorism Work? (2009) Downloads
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:diw:diweos:diweos12

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Economics of Security Working Paper Series from DIW Berlin, German Institute for Economic Research Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Bibliothek ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-19
Handle: RePEc:diw:diweos:diweos12